Scientists want people to bury teabags in the ground

PARIS:

It all started with a tea break between scientific colleagues. A decade ago, a group of European ecology and biodiversity researchers were brainstorming a simple, inexpensive method for measuring the rate of decay of plant material.

They came up with the idea of burying tea bags in the ground and then retrieving them, and comparing their weight before and after.

This was finally put into practice through an extensive citizen science programme run by a consortium of researchers from the University of Utrecht (Netherlands), Umeå University (Sweden), the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety.

And so, since 2010, tea bags have been used to study soil activity and, more specifically, how plant matter decomposes in different soils.

The idea is simple: all over the world, nylon bags of green tea and rooibos tea are buried in the soil, then dug up three months later. The aim is to assess how quickly the matter disintegrates.

“From the mass losses of both the very leafy green tea and the harder to decompose, woody rooibos tea, it became possible to compare both the speed by which the tea leaf material was lost as well as the degree to which it was lost.

“One can compare that with how fast a sandwich is eaten and how much of the crust of the sandwich is left,” the researchers explain in a news release, published by Umeå University.

Since the project was launched, some 36,000 teabags have been buried and retrieved. Experiments are currently being carried out in countries all over the world. Many schoolchildren and other citizen scientists have joined the project.

A Teabag Index website has been set up to keep track of all the experiments being carried out around the world, as well as the results of these experiments.

“Teabags can provide vital information on the global carbon cycle …. The idea is to use this new method to collect data on decay rates from all over the world. With this data we will make a global soil map, and consequently improve global climate models that use these maps,” reads the Teabag Index website.

So far, experiments have revealed some surprising differences in cold climates and agricultural soils. Detailed in a study published in May, the news release explains that in colder regions, the scientists “often observed the combination of a relatively fast initial breakdown with considerable parts of the material left.”

Meanwhile, agriculture “appeared to affect the decomposition rate but not the degree to which certain litter fractions were decomposed.”

You’ll probably never look at your tea bag in the same way again!

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Scientists want people to bury teabags in the ground

Measuring the decay of plant material using simple tea bags is the surprising and ingenious idea behind the ‘Teabag Index.’